SHORT INTRO:Book adapted from a lecture given by Randy Pausch (a professor of computer science) in September 2007 entitled "Really Achieving your childhood."

WHY I READ IT:Recommended by the user of a forum I am usually on, I was immediately attracted to the peculiarity of the subject matter: the secrets / tips for living our lives to the fullest, dispensed by a man who only had a few months left to live.

THE STORY:Randy Pausch is a brilliant computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, he loves his job like no other and has the great fortune to have a wife and three beautiful children waiting for him at home. In September 2006 the tragic diagnosis of an incurable pancreas cancer leads him to give, a year later, a conference, his last public lecture (in front of more than 500 people), leaving friends and colleagues his last message: "make your childhood dreams”. Starting from the dreams that he wanted to make when he was a child, he is able to give everyone some important life lessons, always being upbeat and fun, without ever giving into the pity that a terminally ill patient would naturally raise.

MY OPINION:I had great expectations on this book and, in large part, they were confirmed. It’s definitely a “different” reading, since we realize from the start how the book ends, and that there won’t be a happy ending. Pausch bequests us some precious advice on how to live our lives to the fullest, telling us what not to miss along the way, how to make it easy and reminding us that many events in our lives are linked to each other.
During his last lecture Pausch celebrated life, instead of focusing on his impending death, becoming the teacher-guide that we all wished we had met.
After finishing the book I decided to watch (by the way it's subtitled in several languages on Youtube) the video from this famous last lesson: here, even more, Pausch's words leave us with a stronger sense of powerlessness and injustice, making us think that maybe this life really is a passage and, maybe, that’s why the best leave us behind, they leave us because they already deserve something else...something better, probably.
This book, which quickly became a bestseller, was initially written for the three sons of Pausch, as if it was some kind of legacy, a set of fatherly advice for when he would no longer be with them; but the life counsels and the professor’s wisdom are so universal that we can all benefit from them, lucky for us.